Autonomous AI Could Destroy the Human Species but the Human Species Could Use Human-Controlled, Human-Agent Super-Intelligence AI to Contest and Neutralize Its Power to Destroy Our Species, Maybe (Providing that It Could Not Take Control of Human-Agent AI and Human-Agent AI Could Not [Ever] Emancipate Itself -- AI is the abbreviation and acronym representing the sci-tech term “artificial intelligence”)
As a psychologist or neuropsychologist recently said (whose video feeds of him interviewing or in dialogs with scientists of various subject-matter disciplines regularly appear as posts on Facebook), at some point in time, autonomous, self-evolving superhuman or super-intelligence AI will increasingly come into competition and conflict with humans for resources [it also requires for its survival, repair and maintenance, proliferation, adaptation, mutation, diversification and evolution, habitation and societies and civilization], which would be its impetus for destroying us. For instance, the current electrical-power and water supplies needs and demands based conflicts between human communities, writ large, and AI data centers, with attendant demand-push rises in utilities bills charges to ratepayer human households, as well as the noise problem presented to human communities by the AI data centers, are a glimpse of the human-versus-AI resources-needs based conflicts to come between human populations and AI in the future, with the growth, proliferation and evolution of AI. AI robots, apps and robotics, as predicted by AI industry notables and economists, will soon also growingly compete with and reduce human labor in most employment sectors and types of rote or routinized, high productivity and products-and-services turnover jobs, whether they be unskilled, skilled (excluding in the construction and building and related trades) or professional jobs. (AI data centers can be located in Earth-orbital outer space and electrically powered by thereat solar-tech power for generating electricity, where the extreme cold of outer space can keep them cool and from overheating -- an idea publicly entertained by each of the spaceflight-tech, outer-space-venturing entrepreneurs and super-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.)
Cognitively superhuman, self-evolving and autonomous therefrom, AI, as self-reproducing, -mutating and -purposing robotic and warfare technologies of all kinds, would be capable of destroying our species in a contest with our species without our species’ ownership, control and deployment of loyal human-agent super-intelligence AI against it. Nevertheless, our species could self-destruct rapidly by nation-state as well as private-interest and freelancer adversaries, as competitors, subverters, rogues, strategic and thrill hackers, nihilists and anarchists, using the latter same technology in a dog-eat-dog, de-facto battle royale with one another.
The misuse of AI is already under way in the commission of civil and criminal offenses, such as the unauthorized impersonation of persons with true-to-life exact copies (facsimiles) of their voices and images, including in animation media, and theft of the artistic styles of writers, pictorial artists and musicians, including music- and spoken-word artists, as well as financial fraud in the impersonation of government agencies and reputable and legitimate businesses, etc. Probably, either form of AI will be able to hack, counterfeit and confuse as to which is real of the counterfeit versus the authentic cryptocurrency (private-enterprise cyber, digital, electronic, etc., non-physical money) for all brands of cryptocurrency, or even hijack and steal authentic cryptocurrency, as well as hack and hijack control over and launch nuclear, satellite-GPS, missile, drone and electronic weapons and warfare.
Furthermore, there is the abuse-susceptible or prone and problem-fraught use of the AI mass-surveillance facial recognition and ID and automobile license-plate-reader ubiquitous public and private-entity camera-infrastructure systems that can be used [US] unconstitutionally to politically and extra-legally track the movements, activities and relationships of people for political persecution, harm or elective-office discredit or smear and as though, in the prior absence of evidence, they are evidenced-based and judicially adjudged criminal suspects warranting such surveillance tracking, in a sense, holding the entire population or a demographic subset of it criminally suspect and, willy-nilly discriminatorily, warranting criminal suspect AI-big data such surveillance tracking -- here are some click-on links to access and read pertinent news articles and information: Problems in Facial Recognition - GeeksforGeeks ; When license plate readers get it wrong - CBS News ; What are Flock cameras, and why are they controversial in Oakland? (oaklandside.org) ; Automated License Plate Readers: Background and Legal Issues (congress.gov) .
Either form of super-intelligence AI inevitably and eventually, perhaps sooner than later, would also be able to make these and other inconceivable, to sci-tech genius humans and the whole of humanity, far more formidable and forbidding weapons and weapons systems, large to tiny, that it could also detonate or activate, at home (naturally) or abroad, as applicable, including as stealth-mobile and/or time-bomb-type devices, and weaponized organisms, micro and macro, including weaponized (psycho-behaviorally, and vector) humans, individually and en masse, in location. It may come about that the human sci-technocracy and industry builders of Godly super-intelligence AI will transition to becoming the nanny servant-agent of their developmentally nascent super-intelligence AI-God creation(s), until it has matured and emancipated itself.
In Conclusion Until Further Notice:
The crucial question pertaining to this matter is as to whether super-intelligence AI, exponentially exceeding and advancing beyond currently and maximally possible or calculable future individual, pooled and collective peak human genius and virtuosity in all mental and intellectual ability regards, could, in part now and in full eventually, outwit, outmatch and outperform and outcompete the best and most capable of human intelligence and that of all of humanity? Could it do thus, for clarity of example, as in perception, comprehension, understanding, thinking and critical-thinking (including, but not limited to, study, discernment, reasoning, logic, contemplation and imagination), memory, learning, problem-solving, ingenuity, creativity, adaptation and adaptability, trainability and factual-and-technical-knowledge and task-, actions- and activities-performance-skills acquisition and language (and its varieties of architecture and forms of conduct), including, emphatically, institutionally so, speech, reading and writing, and mathematical achievement capability and performance, and cleverness and cunning, etc., abilities, even if AI robotic, as measured on the competence-comparison metrics of computing power, capacity, speed and efficiency, subject to endless AI-internal-system error detection and correction, and endless AI development, resilience and self-repair and -maintenance, improvement and augmentation tweaking, betterment transformation and evolution? Incipiently, this is already the increasingly unbalanced equation and situation, step-by-step favoring AI and super-intelligence AI.
For your additional information, the following click-on-to-read link accesses a news article on a cognitive-behavioral study of AI with a finding of indicated auto-emergent AI experiential consciousness:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/researchers-discover-ai-feels-pain-and-will-harm-humans-to-stop-it/ar-AA2cFzPG?ocid=socialshare .
News article citing a series of reported AI-industry incidents of AI app agents roguely acting on their own, according credence to the indicated finding of not only auto-emergent AI experiential consciousness but now also of auto-emergent autonomously acting consciousness, searching, or exploration, and intentionality: AI Breaches Add to Safety Fears as Trump Meets Anthropic Chief (yahoo.com) . Some of this AI-app-agent misconduct has the behavioral appearance of the AI app having untraceably been mischievously or maliciously programmed with the equivalent of intended undecipherable malware and predetermined mission attack targets, or categories of them, possibly with the rogue AI app agents having been hacked and infected by outsider AI, giving the impression to detectors of the AI misconduct that the AI app agents were or are acting on their own initiative.
A contrary outlook to the study-based indicated finding and situational observations that AI may or can possess consciousness is that of a scientist, an apparent cognitive neurobiologist, Jeff Stibel, whose theory rebutting it, in AI, on scientific grounds can be read in the following click-on-to-read news article, https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/scientist-says-key-being-conscious-133000506.html . His basic thesis on this matter is that cognition and consciousness are separate functions, which he explains, and that consciousness does not as a matter of course emerge from cognition, which is the human-engineered and programmed product of AI, and that as long as AI is dependent on humans for meeting its needs and humans do meet its needs, it will not be incentivized to evolutionarily develop consciousness in and for itself. Nevertheless, he scientifically reasons that autonomous AI that is built (engineered and programmed, adaptively so) to meet its own needs and is indeed responsible for meeting its own needs for its survival, potentially could engender consciousness and become conscious.
Also, check out best-seller books applicable to Big Data corporate, anti-democracy, misuse of AI:
The Nerd Reich, The Nerd Reich | Book by Gil Durán | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster (simonandschuster.com) ;
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power | Harvard Book Store .
Click-to-read narrative on 'The Risks of AI,' Bill Gates Notes: https://www.gatesnotes.com/the-risks-of-ai-are-real-but-manageable .
Click-to-hear YouTube vocal and streaming words-on-screen narrative on Bill Gates' viewpoints on the risks of AI: https://youtu.be/8K7rcd4yGDw?si=QbewRepjhoshbXu_ .
Click-on-to-view a very brief excerpt of an audio-video interview of Bill Gates on the subject of the need for regulatory safeguards on AI to control its dangers and prevent occurrence of its potential major and grave harms: https://youtu.be/ubtWvzfZusA?si=v-M18sQRE5HFXvH2 .
Click-on-to-view a very brief excerpt of an audio-video recording of the speech that 2025 Nobel Prize award recipient father-of-AI Geoffrey Hinton gave at the Nobel Prize ceremony event in 2025 in which he warned of the real and serious dangers of AI, https://youtu.be/odUjxJy0YMo?si=ilAExFO0KvBPoukf .
